


Counting Pens

by Qu_Marsh



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Angst, Gen, Insomnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-09-16
Updated: 2001-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-16 12:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qu_Marsh/pseuds/Qu_Marsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short bit o' Fujin angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Pens

  
Fujin reached for one of the pens she kept on her bedside table and bent it in half.

_Snap._

If only that could be enough to appease her rage. But it was endless, an all-consuming fire that fed off her humanity and left her an empty shell that craved more callous cruelty to fill itself. The scale of the horror the world had inflicted on her was infinite, and so too was her boundless, blind anger against existence. Nothing was enough to compensate for the offenses she had suffered. And so she could only hate, hate, hate, and hate some more. 

_Snap._ Another pen bit the dust. 

She could insulate herself a little. Keeping a steady supply of breakable materials beside her bed at least gave her a small source of comfort during these hellish nights. But snapping little bits of plastic could only numb her momentarily before she returned to her abyss of self-loathing introspection. She needed more to tear apart; she wanted to spring from her bed and smash every furnishing in the room into pieces in one continuous burst of anger, sobbing all the while, just so that she might divert herself from despair for a few seconds. So torturous was the weight of her existence all that even a single instant of respite was worth any price. And destruction was the only catharsis she knew. 

_Snap._

Fujin prayed to Hyne she could save herself before she reached the point where she had to destroy her room. She knew she was only digging herself a bigger hole with each fit. She was getting addicted to the violence, slowly jettisoning the last vestiges of her humanity each time without realizing what she was doing. Hardly a night went by now that did not at least once find her shivering naked in the dark, awakened by her own discontent and too furious at herself to sleep. And the others at Garden were losing their tolerance for her unprovoked acts of wanton destruction. She wanted to tell them how sorry she was, how much she longed to be freed from this darkness, how much she wanted to be normal, but her suffering was too incomprehensibly vast to fit into the constraining concepts offered by words. Her mind worked in ways that the English language could not keep up with. So the occasional "RAGE" or "PAIN" was her only communiqu´ to the outside world. 

_Snap._

Yesterday she had been driving a car through the Balamb inn. Tonight she had been hunting for Moombas under her bed with a fishing pole. The dreams themselves probably meant nothing - after all, what symbolism could be derived from that nonsense? - but they were symptoms of a discontented mind. A mind that knew no peace, that could never bring itself to gently shut itself down when it needed to. She was too nervous for that. Too angry, too unhappy, too unsatisfied to ever be able to relax and slumber away with the knowledge that what she had done that day was enough. There was always more she needed to. More time needed to make up for the mistakes she had made. How could she want to sleep when she so desperately needed to change herself now? And so she always ended up in the same place: Sleeping fitfully, always on the verge of an outburst of rage, praying there was some way she could appease her rage but knowing at the same time the harder she looked the harder it would be to find. 

_Snap. Snap._

Fujin hated the cycle without mercy, even though she knew it was her hatred that it thrived on. But hating was all could she do -- how could she calm herself? By wanting to so badly that she would be willing to cut off her hand and bleed to sleep just for some decent rest? No, that only angered her, stirred her heart when she needed to let go. She knew it wasn't like this for the others. They were not so acutely wounded by their troubles. She envied the happy, grinning people like Selphie, who could forget their troubles before they'd happened and seemed impervious to the kind of self-loathing that was choking Fujin. 

_Snap._ She thought she was a little more satisfied. But not enough. 

She could live this way, yes. But she knew that surviving wasn't enough. She might get by now, but there would come a day when her life would end, and she wanted more than anything to be able to say then that her life had been worthwhile. The prospect of lying on her deathbed having never known anything but despair, having nothing which would she could justify her all-too-brief existence, terrified her. Because when she considered where she was going, she had to admit it that the hope that one day, some day, things might be different was the only thing still compelling her to go through the motions of life. Living through this hell only to die for ... for ... for nothing would be the ultimate insult, a prospect so humiliating and denying of any of self-worth that it would strip her soul's last shreds of hope and decency down into pure RAGE and reduce all of creation into a detestable, worthless false idol in her eyes. 

_Snap. Snap. Snap._ Fujin burned through three pens in a burst of fresh hatred. 

She was losing it again. No, she couldn't be this way, but... but... but she just couldn't control herself. It made her so angry to think about herself. 

_Snap._

And now the loathing was consuming her again, driving her to desperation, forcing her to destroy just to keep herself from falling into the void. She had lost so much of her life to this darkness. It wasn't just her future she loathed, but her wasted life. Every day was just another failed opportunity, a chance to change herself that she lost amidst her spite and helpless self-loathing. She wanted to smile, to dream, to love and have friends and interests and hope. To make mistakes, and recover from them. To try new things, to have new experiences. To get out of this claustrophobic room and make an impression on the world that wasn't random violence. To do all the things a seventeen year-old girl was supposed to do. She didn't want to be so angry! She hated being angry! And she knew that that hatred only made things worse, and that she would never, ever escape this cycle. Somewhere something had gone wrong, and she had been thrown permanently from the track that led to serenity. 

_Snap._

She was running out of time to save herself. She would only be young once, and with each passing day another chance to go out and live the way she was supposed to live was lost to wretched misanthropy. Even if she eventually managed to change herself, would it be worth it at that point? Already she had missed so many things that she was supposed to have. Her childhood and adolescence - years she would never get back - were nothing but a blur of misery and anger. She felt like she was chasing after a departing train, running along beside it in a desperate attempt to keep up. But life was pulling away from the station without her, and as her classmates began to accelerate out into the world with a speed she could not hope to match, she could stop and watch as she was left behind. 

_Snap. Snap._

And then she was out of pens. 


End file.
